When Donald Trump announced Mike Pence as his running mate eight years ago, thrusting the little-known, staunchly anti-abortion governor to national prominence, Pence’s old-fashioned views on women were what immediately garnered attention. If there’s one thing that will forever define him as a public figure — aside from Trump supporting calls to have him hanged on January 6 — it’s the fact that Pence refuses to eat alone with any woman who’s not his wife and avoids attending events where alcohol will be served without her by his side. That revelation made it easy for people to dismiss him as some freak from a bygone era who was picked to rally white Evangelicals for Trump. (Which he did.)
But Pence has been dumped this time around for his intolerable disloyalty in thwarting Trump’s efforts to overturn the 2020 election results. Instead, Trump has chosen the younger and sharper-tongued J.D. Vance, 39, to run with him. Vance’s selection may suggest Trump’s campaign is trying to get with the times and maybe even peel off some suburban women voters who were turned off by Biden’s debate performance. Yet Vance’s policy ideas are actually quite dark for women: He has compared abortion to slavery; he advocates against no-fault divorce, preferring to trap women in potentially violent marriages; and he seems to loathe working women, describing the child-free among us as “miserable cat ladies” and the working moms who require child care as bad mothers who aren’t “normal people.”
“If your worldview tells you that it’s bad for women to become mothers but liberating for them to work 90 hours a week in a cubicle at the New York Times or Goldman Sachs,” Vance tweeted in 2022, “you’ve been had.”
These ideas are every bit as sexist as Pence’s “never dine with a woman” rule. And the underlying message from Vance — that women have a binary choice between career and motherhood and that the latter is the only right one to make — is as old as the steam engine. But as an Ivy League–educated man in his 30s, and someone who understands social media in a way the old, wooden running mate that came before him never could, Vance can put an ominous new polish on outdated views of marriage roles and women in the workplace.
To that end, Vance has scrubbed his hardline abortion stance from his website this week. He’s now trying to reframe remarks he made in 2022 condemning rape victims who want abortions due to the “inconvenience” of being pregnant and, in 2021, suggesting women stay in violent marriages for the sake of the kids. Once he joined the GOP ticket, he and his campaign began insisting that none of these comments was anti-woman; Vance is just pro-family and pro-children as a result of his own rough upbringing in Appalachia.
“Both me and my mom actually were victims of domestic violence,” Vance told Fox News’s Sean Hannity this week. “So to say ‘Vance has supported women staying in violent marriages,’ I think it’s shameful for them to take a guy with my history and my background and say that that’s what I believe. It’s not what I believe. It’s not what I said.”
Vance can try to “soften” his past comments and positions all he wants, but what he really thinks of working women and moms is clear. And it doesn’t feel like a coincidence that this man’s meteoric rise in politics has paralleled the cultural resurgence of the “tradwife,” a particular brand of white woman who deceptively boasts online about how baking bread for her man and carrying his babies through fields of wildflowers has brought her more fulfillment than the feminist movement ever could. It’s ironic that Vance’s views feel tailor-made to these women who lean way into traditional marriage roles, considering that his own wife is a corporate lawyer he met at Yale. Usha Vance has clerked for Supreme Court Chief Justice John Roberts and Justice Brett Kavanaugh at different points in her illustrious and lucrative career, and she worked for a corporate law firm in San Francisco and Washington, D.C., up until this week. It’s safe to assume such a high-powered couple with three children under the age of 7 have used some form of child care these past few years to accommodate their work.
Vance’s policy ideas around childbearing and working mothers also make no logical sense in conjunction with each other. After banning abortion, he wants to make childbirth free to incentivize couples to have kids and raise America’s birth rate. “We are effectively run in this country, via the Democrats, via our corporate oligarchs, by a bunch of childless cat ladies who are miserable at their own lives and the choices that they’ve made and so they want to make the rest of the country miserable too,” Vance told Tucker Carlson in 2021. “If we want a healthy ruling class in this country … we should support people who actually have kids because those are the people who actually have a direct stake in the future of the country.” Of course, free childbirth in the U.S. would be a fine idea on its own. But Vance has also called universal child care “a massive subsidy to the lifestyle preferences of the affluent over the preferences of the middle and working class.” He knows that giving affordable child care to working parents allows women to be in the workforce and earn higher wages and that women are increasingly the breadwinners in their households. Vance wants to reverse that progress and make it harder for moms to work so a woman’s only role in a family is to produce and care for babies.
The J.D. Vance plan would force women to carry their pregnancies to term, trap them in violent marriages, and keep child care for working parents as unaffordable as possible to maintain a traditional 1950s family structure. None of these ideas he has publicly floated “support people who actually have kids,” as he claims is his policy goal. This low-rent millennial Don Draper is going to do his best to turn us all into tradwives and convince us that it’s for our own good while he basks in the spoils of his own dual-income marriage. Suburban moms and cat ladies alike should reject this whole comically misogynist GOP ticket.
